Patrick White - The Vivisector

Because it was expected of him, Hurtle followed out to the edge of the lawn. He was still too close to the painting to share Harry’s enthusiasm for a gun, neat and shining though it was.

As you watched, Harry loaded. There was a pigeon clattering out of a palm. Harry took aim, his shoulder muscle bulging out of proportion. He shot at the curving pigeon, and missed.

‘Need to practise,’ he mumbled into his beard, working his shoulders as though to shrug out the rheumatism. Then remembering, he looked down: ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it. In a paddock full of rabbits, you can’t miss.’

‘There aren’t any paddocks full of rabbits.’

‘Not here. At Mumbelong.’ Mr Courtney’s voice had descended to a man’s serious level; his eyes, too, were serious and moist.

Hurtle stood kicking with his sound boot at the springy mattress of lawn. He had blown his cheeks out to match Mr Courtney’s seriousness. He wasn’t going to destroy a vision by introducing anything real. He wouldn’t say a word, because he knew from experience that impossibilities can be enjoyed in spite of their impossibility. So they were catching the night train, like the time Mumma left in a hurry to visit someone sick. Tunnels couldn’t get blacker at night. He sat beside his friend, sharing his overcoat.

‘Harry?’

Mrs Courtney’s voice, trying to be natural, sounded coldly from the veranda; it sounded more educated than ever yet. Even Mr Courtney was startled. Rhoda had come out from the study to be with her mother because she expected something to happen.

Mrs Courtney was staring at the gun. Anger had enamelled her eyes. She could have been going to rush out, not at all ladylike, and grab the thing, and break it in half; when she changed her mind apparently. She started twiddling a little useless handkerchief. The blazing blue died out in her eyes: in their new misty thoughtfulness they looked almost grey. Although they were still fixed on the gun, she was thinking beyond: she seemed to have decided the gun didn’t exist.

‘Darling,’ she began, and lowered her eyelids a moment to show how seriously she ought to be taken, ‘we must remember he doesn’t belong to us. Mrs Duffield will start worrying about him.’ She had such a soft pink smile.

‘Mrs Duffield? Oh yes, the mother,’ Mr Courtney remembered in a hurried grumpy voice.

They all bundled into the study, where only Mrs Courtney could have told what was in store for them.

She glanced once at the gun after Harry had stood it in a corner. Then she opened out in a high clear voice which reminded you of the voices of the older girls, its tone much more expert though, her clothes so much more complicated, and she chose to speak in a code he recognized by now as the French language.

‘Il est intelligent, n’est-ce pas? Charmant! Il parle avec un accent atroce, mais on peut le corriger à la maison — lui tout seul avec cette gouvernante que je vais engager — et la petite, naturellement. ’

Possibly Mr Courtney was less good at French. He went: Wee wee wee; while Mrs Courtney laughed such glossy laughs, she was so pleased the way things were going. Because you had no difficulty in cracking some of the code your eardrums thundered to hear about your atrocious accent. It was no compensation to discover you were also intelligent and charming. In future he would talk extra bookish at them, imitating Mr Olliphant, just as Mrs Courtney was imitating the French.

He heard Rhoda joining in. ‘It’s always la petite! What about la petite? ’ The sprinkling of moles on her neck showed up like shot when rage or injustice made her pale, while the big leaf-shaped birthmark seemed to flutter.

‘Take him, Rhoda, to the laundry,’ her mother ordered, trying to push them together.

But la petite had got the sulks. She wouldn’t, and he was glad: it would have been humiliating to pretend you needed the sour ugly thing.

Finally, it was Mrs Courtney herself who accompanied him, at least as far as the green door. There she stopped, and as she kissed him he seemed to be swallowed up in an envelope of scented flesh. He was only brought round by her jewellery pricking and hitting him.

‘We shall meet again,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘Very soon, I hope. We must organize it!’

Then the green door puffed open, and he smelled the smells of ordinary life.

The following day, ironing day at Sunningdale, he was again ready to leave with Mumma although she had paid no attention to his hair.

‘Oh no. Not on yer life. A treat is a treat,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the Courtneys would think.’

‘But they’re interested in me. I know they’ll be expecting me.’

Mumma looked so ugly in her old braided shapeless black. She smelled of soap and beeswax. She said he was suffering from what was called delusions. He knew he would never make her see the truth.

When next Monday came round, it was his last chance before school began. So he grew cunning. He didn’t take extra trouble with himself, not because he hadn’t hope, it was because he might catch her off her guard, at the last moment slip past her opposition with rough haste and in his ordinary clothes. He was, in fact, full of hope. In his mind he revived the words and silences of Mumma’s own hopes for him. His memory glittered with the moods of Courtneys’ chandelier.

That morning, after the others had run off, he sat dawdling over the last grey slime of his porridge. She was preparing her bundle, with a few of those cachous, the headache powders, the old leather purse, odds and ends she would take with her and never use.

When he couldn’t put it off any longer he said: ‘I bet they asked for me yesterday, and you didn’t tell.’

She laughed in an ugly way he didn’t recognize. ‘Why should they ask?’

‘Because they told me of things we was gunner do together.’ There was no use wasting grammar or accents on Mumma: you had to speak the way she understood.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘ladies and gentlemen talk! It’s what they call “being charming”. But what they say isn’t what they mean. Otherwise they wouldn’t get through all they’ve got to do — balls, and dinner parties, and all that. I know! ’

‘But Mr Courtney showed me a gun. We was going to the country.’

‘I believe ’e’s gone — to one of the properties ’e owns. That’s where ’is interests lie — where the money comes from. A little boy like you would only get in the way.’

She picked the baby up, and began easing up the bundle with the help of her knee. When she was ready, she stooped and kissed you to show her love, but it was a level helping, like she doled out porridge or potato, to keep everybody quiet. If ladies and gentlemen didn’t mean what they said, no more did Mumma.

‘Oh, whoo-aahy?’ he shouted after her when she had gone out the gate.

It sounded as feeble as it was, his voice shining back like that of a little blubbering kid. He couldn’t have done better, though.

She went on, sometimes pausing to easy the baby’s weight. Sep was growing too fast, too heavy, too greedy: the way he would grab hold of her by now she might have been a pudding he meant to guzzle whole.

Mumma didn’t look back from the bottom of the street, only paused to hoist the baby higher.

Then the grey descended inside you.

He wished Mumma and the baby dead. Them all. Courtneys! Himself — himself most of all. The chandelier had gone out in him.

The day, beginning grey, spurted a drop or two, sprinkled at last, and settled into an afternoon of colourless rain. In all the time he had to spend there was nothing he could do, except remember the all-over grey street, with himself and Mumma a black stroke at either end: nothing between, unless he could have put a spitting bonfire. He imagined the yard at Sunningdale, with Mumma bringing in the wetter sheets, wet clothes lashing from the lines, looking naked. When she couldn’t get the wash dried on the day when it ought to have been dried, Mumma would start crying and creating; she had to take the headache powders.